Not seeing recommended videos on YouTube anymore? Here's the reason why

YouTube has changed the way it works so the video service no longer shows recommended videos to those who have their watch history turned off.

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Instead, users who have it switched off - or hardly have any watch history to speak of yet - will not get content recommendations on YouTube's home page.

Those folks will get a streamlined version of the home page instead, allowing them to focus on just searching for the content they want, rather than getting nudges from Google as to what they might like.

As Google explains in a blog post: "This means that starting today, your home feed may look a lot different: you'll be able to see the search bar and the left-hand guide menu, with no feed of recommended videos thus allowing you to more easily search, browse subscribed channels and explore Topic tabs instead."

As you might expect, Google is rolling out this change slowly, so most people may not notice anything different yet. The rollout process will happen over the next few months, we're told.

If you want video recommendations, of course all you have to do is switch on watch history. You can do that from 'My Google Activity' controls, where you'll find a panel for your YouTube History, with an on/off switch, and some sub-settings options.

In other news from Google today, the company is stepping up security with its Chrome browser. Going forward, Google will provide security updates for the web browser on a weekly basis, instead of every two weeks, which effectively closes down the window of opportunity for hackers quite considerably.